International Evidence Review

'Experimenting with Urban Living Labs (ULLs) beyond Smart City-Regions'

Nicola M Headlam & Michael Keith13th. February 2017.

Knowledge Mobilisation for Urban Transformation

• Intelligent city-region : roles and rules – Cognitive city region as knowledge economy (networked) mode

of production– Role of civic university in place-based statecraft at sub-national

scale – Co-production of research, innovation and policy-making (OI2)

• Urban and Living Labs work 2016– Emergent Institutional infrastructures: UK – International exemplars and ideas for UK

• What does inter-disciplinary integrating place making mean? How can we bring together expertise in areas such as computing, mapping, politics, economy, digital anthropology, spatial analysis and urban planning?

• How can we deal with multi-stakeholder ‘helix strategies’? What arethe roles of the private sector, public authorities, academia, civil society and entrepreneurs/activists in these ULLs initiatives? What should the roles be?

• How can ULLs, as a form of collective urban governance, positively influence the smart policy agenda in Europe by going beyond its governance implications?

• What makes the ULL approach attractive and novel?• How are ULL initiatives being operationalised in contemporary urban governance for

sustainability and low carbon cities?• What prospects are there for alternative funding and business models for cities and

regions in Europe?• What are the practical and political interventions needed within multi-stakeholder

approaches, and what are the potential concerns about data technopolitics?• Is another urban governance model possible, a third way between state and market?

Platforms (international)

drivers i

• The growing trend of increased city autonomy evidenced in devolution deals, ‘northern’ (and other) powerhouses and local economic partnerships.

• Unique but networked nature of urban economies that demand a growth in capacity of research based city intelligence for economic development.

• Pressures on public expenditure that generate pressures for major public service reform, recognizing the market innovation possible in annual budgets of several hundred billion pounds annually across the UK.

• Systemic pressures on old models of city governance that demand citizen engagement and more sophisticated interaction with the public domain.

drivers ii

• The need for cities to develop urban futures scenario planning in the face of rapid social and economic change.

• The opportunity for cities to use new methods of data gathering to shape intelligent systems and new technologies both to engage citizens and restructure basic infrastructure provision.

• The challenge for cities to address challenges of vulnerabilities in the built environment, governance networks, metabolic flows (production, consumption and supply chains) and social dynamics at the heart of the city resilience agendas.

Adaptive = intelligent?

The cities that will best survive the challenges facing us in the coming urban century are those that are most amenable to uncertainty. They are those that build flexibility into their code. They assume they will need to accommodate change, and empower their citizens to help them do so. They have solid goals, without a fixed agenda, and they have vision without expectation. They plan through inquiry rather than didacticism, and draw with pencils rather than pens. They know they don’t know what’s coming, so they plan to adapt to anything.

Christin McLaren BMW Guggenheim manager , 2015

Roles for brokers

We return, therefore, to the role of the urban observatory executive as catalyst. (s)He is part diplomat, trying to bring various factions together in a situation in which they will respect and work with each other. He is also part strategist, to the end that academic, city hall, and all the publics and participants can cooperate... Such a man (person) must have tact, imagination, drive, and managerial acumen.

Marshal Dimmock, 1972 cited in Barnes, 1974

Universities have always been full of people who want to change the world. Their new enthusiasm for a growing civic role for their institution reflects the growing expectation that they will do this in a more active and less accidental way in future. …The university of the future will need to regard its local setting as inherent to its operations, with financial, business and cultural exchanges, a range of joint and part-time working arrangements, and a flow of formal and informal contacts. Cities and universities will need to set priorities jointly…and work together to achieve them… in the knowledge that this new activity benefits both sides and is recognised as a core activity for cities and universities alike

(Tewdr-Jones & Godard, 2016:5 )

Roles for Civic universities

http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/carnegieuktrust/wp-content/uploads/sites/64/2016/04/LOW-RES-2578-Carnegie-Interaction.pdf

Source: Shucksmith, 2016

Source: Shucksmith, 2016

http://www.urbaninformatics.net/

QUT Urban Informatics Lab

Contact zones

Institutional form

NESTA, 2014 (Tewdr-Jones and Goddard)

Circuits of credibility (1)

Urban living labs

• A living lab is a platform/project with a specifically territorial focus which works across the sectoral and institutional boundaries of partners or stakeholders. Labs are also often thematically focused and many operate within the “smart city space” (so with technology components) or on “sustainability” questions. There is often a practical and direct civic component to the work of a living lab with “users” represented at all levels of the living lab. Labs have often emerged from a citizen/activist context, and it is symptomatic of their maturation as an institutional form that researchers, and latterly research policy has been interested in their potential. Living labs are closely connected with Open Social Learning and Open Innovation (OI2 in European terms) and with forms of “quadruple helix thinking” which blends actors from market, state, research base and civil society. At times labs have been linked with specific objectives as diverse as; product testing for tech companies, behaviour change around transport modalities and energy usage, use of generic drugs to combat HIV, plan-making and zoning, and in animating university partnerships.

Emergent university research/policy entities

Urban Living Pilots

Urban living pilotsBest embedded in civic university models- Newcastle city futures- City redi at birmingham

• Urban/ Living Labs are well established ways of working in which partnerships and networks between research, industry, civic and community sectors (usually some of not all) harness collective learning. There is a wide array of practice under the loose banner of urban/living labs. Labs may operate at any spatial scale, from neighbourhood to whole world and are incredible sensitive to context

• Productively they can bring together the research ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem; two areas of activity that overlap but that have significantly different roots in government policy and funding streams.

• Reflecting the distinctive backgrounds of ‘urban labs’ the nature of disruption and innovation they promote varies significantly. Some rely on directly commissioned research to generate tightly specified end goals on a contractual basis. Other models are closer to ‘blue skies’ or fundamental research that depend less on contractual relations and more on trust and partnerships built up between new institutions, research cultures and governance innovation over longer periods of time.

• Cities must be viewed as primary partners in the initiatives. As such there ought to be less focus on the development of research questions per se and more on economic drivers for cities, Invest to save principles and budgets, and the possibility for disruption, experimentation and innovation in improving public services. And further Institutions neither inside nor outside the academy ought be supported to guard against ‘extractive’ relationships with city partners.

Platforms (international)

Lessons / emergent findings

• International exemplars– Surveys of labs emphases heterogenity of

practices– Fundamental and radical version of co-production

changes power structures and political economy of research enterprise• Brokerage function valued and emphasised• Place-based intellectual leadership from civic

universities

platforms

Need links between research, impact and innovation through platforms that blend;- research centre - policy unit - think tank - consultancy - start up/spin-out - laboratory- Observatory- mechanism for public participation- activist networks

Intelligent cities then, have

1. Cities as primary partners2. Institutions neither inside nor outside the academy3. City hall and intelligent cities: flexibility, city futures,

international learning4. The economic drivers for cities clearly defined

a) Invest to save principles and budgetsb) Disruptive innovationc) Experimentation and innovation

5. Global learning, national delivery, locally embedded